More than a belated Gutenberg Age: Daily Newspapers in India
25
Global Media Journal German Edition ISSN 2196-4807 Vol. 3, No. 2, Autumn/Winter 2013 URN:nbn:de:gbv:547-201300519 More than a belated Gutenberg Age: Daily Newspapers in India An Overview of the Print Media Development since the 1980s, Key Issues and Current Perspectives Nadja-Christina Schneider 1 Abstract: While TV may still be the dominant medium in India today, and the internet and mobile phone industry are currently growing at a tremendous speed, ‘old’ media such as the press don’t seem to be losing ground as yet. In times of a recurrent debate about the crisis of print media in Europe and the US, the Indian newspaper market still keeps growing and has attracted the interest of multinational corporations. One reason for this is that India is presently one of the largest markets for English-language newspapers and magazines in the world. Notwithstanding the continued growth of the English-language press, it is above all daily newspapers in the major Indian languages which form the motor of this unprecedented press boom. The article shows that in the wake of economic liberalization and the enforcement of the consumption-oriented market economy, the newspaper market in India can be said to be changing from a linguistically ‘split public’, which was characterized by many asymmetries for decades, to an integrated multilingual ‘consumer sphere’. It can thus be argued that in this new consumer sphere, the old existing and imaginary boundaries between ‘English-language’, ‘Indian-language’ or ‘regional newspapers’ are becoming increasingly fuzzy, whereas the new geographies of the ‘regional’ are now very important for the expansion and consolidation of daily newspapers. In order to de-westernize the current debate about the ‘newspaper crisis’, it would thus be important to look at different historical as well as contemporary trajectories of newspaper developments in the framework of changing media configurations in the so-called global South, which may differ significantly from the European or North American context. Keywords: India, newspaper boom, media globalization, problems in categorization, cultural imperialism, De-Westernization 1 I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of this article and Bettina Gräf (Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin) as well as Carola Richter (Freie Universität Berlin) for their comments on a later version.
More than a belated Gutenberg Age: Daily Newspapers in India
More than a belated Gutenberg Age: Daily Newspapers in IndiaGlobal
Media Journal German Edition ISSN 2196-4807 Vol. 3, No. 2,
Autumn/Winter 2013 URN:nbn:de:gbv:547-201300519 More than a belated
Gutenberg Age: Daily Newspapers in India An Overview of the Print
Media Development since the 1980s, Key Issues and Current
Perspectives Nadja-Christina Schneider1 Abstract: While TV may
still be the dominant medium in India today, and the internet and
mobile phone industry are currently growing at a tremendous speed,
‘old’ media such as the press don’t seem to be losing ground as
yet. In times of a recurrent debate about the crisis of print media
in Europe and the US, the Indian newspaper market still keeps
growing and has attracted the interest of multinational
corporations. One reason for this is that India is presently one of
the largest markets for English-language newspapers and magazines
in the world. Notwithstanding the continued growth of the
English-language press, it is above all daily newspapers in the
major Indian languages which form the motor of this unprecedented
press boom. The article shows that in the wake of economic
liberalization and the enforcement of the consumption-oriented
market economy, the newspaper market in India can be said to be
changing from a linguistically ‘split public’, which was
characterized by many asymmetries for decades, to an integrated
multilingual ‘consumer sphere’. It can thus be argued that in this
new consumer sphere, the old existing and imaginary boundaries
between ‘English-language’, ‘Indian-language’ or ‘regional
newspapers’ are becoming increasingly fuzzy, whereas the new
geographies of the ‘regional’ are now very important for the
expansion and consolidation of daily newspapers. In order to
de-westernize the current debate about the ‘newspaper crisis’, it
would thus be important to look at different historical as well as
contemporary trajectories of newspaper developments in the
framework of changing media configurations in the so-called global
South, which may differ significantly from the European or North
American context.
Keywords: India, newspaper boom, media globalization, problems in
categorization, cultural imperialism, De-Westernization
1 I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft
of this article and Bettina Gräf
(Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin) as well as Carola Richter (Freie
Universität Berlin) for their comments on a later version.
Vol.3No.2Autumn/Winter 2013 www.globalmediajournal.de
2
Introduction Along with the process of economic liberalization, the
consumption and market oriented economy found its way into India
from the 1980s onwards. Big Indian newspaper companies, such as the
Times of India Group from Mumbai, the Hindustan Times Group from
New Delhi, the Eenadu Group from Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh or the
Jagran Group from Kanpur in North India, among many others, not
only benefited from this process, but they can be viewed as a major
driving force of India’s ‘economic miracle’ in the 1990s and 2000s.
It is noteworthy that most of these publishing houses soon turned
into ever-expanding multimedia companies and thus had a huge
influence on the increased horizontal as well as vertical
integration and convergence of different media sectors in India.
While TV may still be the dominant medium in India today, and the
internet and mobile phone industry are currently growing at a
tremendous speed, it is interesting to observe that ‘old’ media
such as the press don’t seem to be losing ground as yet. In times
of a recurrent debate about the crisis of print media in Europe and
the US, or an oft-heard assessment that print has no future, the
Indian newspaper market still keeps growing and has attracted the
interest of multinational corporations. One reason for this is that
India is also presently one of the largest markets for
English-language newspapers and magazines in the world. According
to the latest edition of the World Press Trends Report (WAN- IFRA
2013), the multi-edition English-language daily newspaper Times of
India would appear to have a much larger circulation than any other
English newspaper in the world.2 Some key figures on newspapers in
India are shown in table 1. Tab. 1: Newspaper Circulation
Figures
Total number of newspaper registered as on 31st March 2010- 2011:
82,222 Number of new newspaper registered in 2011: 4853 Total
number of circulations: 32,92,04,841 Largest number of newspapers
registered in any Indian language (Hindi): 32,793 Second largest of
newspaper registered (English): 11,478 State with largest number of
newspapers (Uttar Pradesh): 13,065 State with second largest number
of newspapers (Delhi):10,606
(Source: Registrar of Newspapers for India)3
2 Times of India is listed at position 4 in the “Top 50 paid-for
dailies” ranking, whereas the daily
newspapers The Sun and the Wall Street Journal are at position 11
and 12. The Japanese dailies Yomiuri Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun and
Mainichi Shimbun occupy the first three positions in this ranking.
It is also remarkable that 18 daily newspapers out of the “Top 50”
are Indian newspapers: 4 English-language dailies, 6 Hindi dailies,
2 Malayalam dailies, 2 Telugu dailies, 2 Tamil daiiles, 1 Marathi
and 1 Bengali daily newspaper. Furthermore, 12 newspapers are
Chinese and 11 Japanese dailies, 3 newspapers are from South Korea
and only 3 of them are US dailies, 2 are from the UK and 1 from
Germany. The vast majority of newspapers is thus currently
circulated and read in Asia (WAN-IFRA 2013, Annex 2: 35).
3 Retrieved from
http://thehoot.org/web/NEWSPAPERS/5845-1-1-37-true.html (last
checked on June 26th, 2012).
Vol.3No.2Autumn/Winter 2013 www.globalmediajournal.de
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Notwithstanding the continued growth of the English-language press,
it is above all daily newspapers in the major Indian languages
which form the motor of this unprecedented press boom. Especially
the potential of the Hindi press and of other regional-language
newspapers had been underestimated for decades and the same holds
true with regard to advertising in regional languages. Other very
successful newspapers are published in the four South Indian
languages Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil and in Marathi. Besides the
sweeping breakthrough of advertising in regional languages, the two
decisive factors for this tremendous and steady growth in
circulation and readership figures over the last thirty years
clearly lie in the regionalization and localization of newspaper
offices and of newspaper content, which also practically did not
exist until the beginning of the 1980s. It was only when market
research began to expand all over the country in the late 1970s
that the Indian-language press was able to acknowledge and realize
its huge growth potential. Especially the results of the second
National Readership Survey (NRS) in 1978 can be regarded as a real
breakthrough in this context (Jeffrey 2000: 65f.). Over the next
eight years since the implementation of the first NRS, newspaper
readership in India had grown by 65 per cent in cities. This
increase in readership alone demonstrates that the print media
sector had already at that time achieved a considerable success in
the history of the Indian market economy. At the same time, this
development also led to speculations about the potential readership
in less urbanized or rural regions (ibid.). Today, 25 years after
this decisive turning point for the Indian-language press, there is
an interesting ongoing debate about the question if “regional is
really the new national” (Gupta 2013) and some observers argue that
newspapers will have to focus much more on the small towns and
rural regions and try to build and engage local reader communities
in order to avoid an ‘onslaught’ of digital media as it is being
observed in Europe and the US. Rather optimistically, Robin
Jeffrey, author of the seminal monograph “India’s Newspaper
Revolution” (2000) said recently that “print in India has 10 to 15
years to go before it hits the sorts of downturn that is changing
the print landscapes in the US and elsewhere”.4 He also pointed out
that the re-use of old newspaper for so many purposes - from
“lining walls to the packaging of bhel puri5” is such an integral
part of daily life in India that newspapers area unlikely to shrink
as they did in the West (ibid.). However, in view of the ongoing
debate about the crisis of print media in Europe and the US, many
observers are wondering if there is really so much “headroom for
growth” (Gupta 2013) for print media in India or in South Asia in
general. Especially when the results of the fourth round of the
Indian Readership Survey 2012 (IRS 2012 Q 4) findings were
published, it became clear that while some English- and
Indian-
4 „Indian print media will flourish for next 15 years“, NY Daily
News, Apr 1, 2012. Retrieved from:
http://india.nydailynews.com/business/c1a6a4b714235b273343c066660b4b31/indian-print-
media-will-flourish-for-next-15-years (last checked: Sep 10,
2013)
Vol.3No.2Autumn/Winter 2013 www.globalmediajournal.de
4
language newspapers still manage to grow, some of the big dailies
were for the first time in many years losing readers (see Tab. 2).
Tab. 2: Top 10 Daily Newspapers in 2012 (IRS Q 3 and Q 4) (average
issue readership, all figures in ‘000)6
Publication Language 2012 Q 3 2012 Q 4 Dainik Jagran Hindi 16474
16370 Dainik Bhaskar Hindi 14491 14416 Hindustan Hindi 12242 12246
Malayala Manorama Malayalam 9752 9760 Amar Ujala Hindi 8536 8434
The Times of India English 7653 7615 Daily Thanthi Tamil 7417 7334
Lokmat Marathi 7409 7313 Rajasthan Patrika Hindi 6818 6837
Mathrubhumi Malayalam 6415 6334
The following article is divided into four sections. In the first
section, I will give a brief overview of the transformation of the
press sector after India’s independence in 1947 into a private
business sector which was, however, not independent from indirect
censorship and other influences by successive Indian governments.
Subsequently, I will explain some of the factors which were
responsible for the unexpected and phenomenal growth of daily
newspapers in the 1980s and 1990s - two decades which were
simultaneously marked by the rapid growth of television and the
transition from state TV monopoly (Doordarshan) to the burgeoning
of private pan-Indian and regional satellite and cable TV. In the
third section, I will discuss the problem of a binary linguistic
categorization of a ‘national’, English language vs. a ‘regional’,
Indian-language press and the interrelated (non-) perception of the
multilingual press market in India which, as I would like to argue,
has largely influenced the academic ‘production’ of information and
knowledge about this medium until the mid-2000s. Even though it can
hardly be denied that, due to the colonial and postcolonial power
asymmetries, the print sector has been ‘divided by language’7 for
many decades, it seems that especially the post-liberalization
dynamics of a strong newspaper expansion into smaller urban and
rural areas have blurred and continue to blur some of the old
imaginary and existing boundaries between these linguistically
defined categories. So the question arises, what new concepts and
categories could be used to analyze and better contextualize the
development of newspapers in the context of a rapidly globalizing
and changing media system in India? Another aspect which is
important in order to understand India’s integration into the
global media market is the question of foreign direct investments
in media,
6 All IRS 2012 data are retrieved from the Media Research Users
Council (MRUC):
http://www.mruc.net/ (last checked Sep 11, 2013). 7 Title of a
documentary film by Vandana Pednekar Magal: „Divided by Language:
India’s
Newspapers“ (2007).
5
which, until today, remains a very sensitive issue. From the
perspective of print media and the decade-long reputation as the
decisive medium of the anti-colonial freedom struggle, the fourth
section will shed some light on the controversy about foreign
entries into the newspaper market in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Finally, I argue in the concluding paragraph that it is time to
de-westernize the current debate about the ‘global newspaper
crisis’ or at least, to broaden the lens and represent a truly
global picture of recent newspaper developments and the current
global situation. Newspaper markets in Asia are very strong today,
the conditions which enabled them to grow and emerge were very
different from the European or Northern American context, so they
may perhaps also follow a different trajectory in the next one or
two decades, as many experts hope. Transformation of the press
sector after India’s independence 1947 Structural framework and the
role of the government After Independence8, the Press Commission,
which was founded in 1952, suggested the establishment of two
institutions, the Registrar of Newspapers for India (RNI) and the
Press Council. Founded on the basis of functions and obligations as
they had been detailed in the Press and Registration of Books Act
of 1867, the newly founded Registrar of Newspapers for India was to
monitor the development of the print media sector and to collect
statistical material. As an autonomous body, the Press Council was
to monitor all developments that could potentially harm the freedom
of the press. Furthermore, the Press Council was expected to
promote the incorporation of self-regulating mechanisms into the
structures of the press sector. Hence, the independent state in
principle supported the private character of newspaper companies
and, consequently, the market- based operation of the Indian
newspaper sector, as Nair describes in the following quote:
"The trends in ownership and organization of newspapers, which were
beginning to be apparent in the late colonial period, became fully
visible by the beginning of the 1950s. The report of the First
Press Commission (FPS), took note of these trends. Importantly, the
profit motive replaced the idealistic and missionary spirit of the
former days. The individually owned or family concerns got
converted into joint stock companies and the number of papers under
the control of each individual concern increased, leading to
concentration of ownership. […] The process of transformation of
press from a craft to a commercial venture was thus complete" (Nair
2003: 4183).
8 Until Independence, newspaper publishing in India could be
broadly subsumed under the three
following categories: (1) the establishment press (or Anglo-Indian
newspapers, e.g. The Statesman, The Pioneer or The Times of India;
(2) the national or nationalist press (English newspapers owned by
Indians, e.g. The National Herald, The Hindustan Times, The Hindu
or The Indian Express) and (3) the anti-colonial Indian-language
press (e.g. Ananda Bazar Patrika, Kesari, Sandesh, Bombay Samachar,
Mathrubhumi or Aaj). See Nair 2003, Raghavan 1994 and Ståhlberg
2002. Sonwalkar estimates that the total number of newspapers and
magazines within the second and third category, i.e. anti-colonial
press in India, amounted up to 4,000, in English as well as in many
Indian languages (Sonwalkar 2002: 823).
Vol.3No.2Autumn/Winter 2013 www.globalmediajournal.de
6
However, it would be wrong to conclude that the postcolonial state
was going to refrain from influencing and exerting control over
newspapers in India. Outwardly, the image of an independent Indian
press free from any form of censorship was upheld, true to
Jawaharlal Nehru’s often quoted motto “I would rather have a
completely free press with all the dangers in the wrong use of the
freedom than a suppressed or regulated press“ (quoted in: Joglekar
1999: 8). But in practice the state used inconspicuous means of
interference, such as issuing printing licenses and, more
importantly, placing government advertisements. As long as nearly
no private advertising existed, governing parties enjoyed a
monopoly and made ample use of their privilege - a practice which
had been put in place in the 1920s under British rule and which the
postcolonial government adopted ceaselessly (Jeffrey 2000: 12).
Postcolonial continuity: Government bias against Indian-language
newspapers Until the gradual replacement of government advertising
by corporate advertising in the course of the liberalization of the
Indian economy in the 1980s and early 1990s, successive Indian
governments used their advertising monopoly to influence the press
for their interests. “The use of advertising to punish, reward and
thereby seek to influence newspapers became part of the repertoire
of political parties in government” (Jeffrey 2000: 60). Hence,
during the first decades following Independence the press and the
state became interdependent. The danger resulting from too much
interference by the state or from pre-emptive self- censorship by
the press was often pointed out. Many observers were also critical
of the fact that the English-language press received by far the
largest amount of government advertising budgets, while non-English
(Indian- or regional-language) newspapers were clearly
disadvantaged. As Jeffrey argues, the unequal treatment was partly
based on the central government’s assumption that the non-English-
language press was ‘less national’ and ‘less modern’ and exhibited
more ‘communalist tendencies’ than the English-language press - an
attitude remarkably similar to the stance the British colonial
administration had taken vis-à-vis the so- called “vernacular”9
press (Jeffrey 2003: 6-10, see also Naregal 2001: 1-17). It is
precisely this binary categorization of a ‘national (=
English-language)’ vs. ‘regional or vernacular (= Indian-language)’
press which, until very recently, not only dominated the general
perception, but also formed the basis for the analytical categories
that were applied in many academic publications. I will elaborate
on this problem in the third section below.
9 Vernacular literally means “local language” or “dialect”, the
term “vernacular press” was established by the British colonial
administration in order to denote all non-English publications in
India. Some authors consciously avoid the term as it has a negative
connotation, and they prefer to use “Indian-“ or “regional
language” press.
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The inequality between English- and Indian-language newspapers was
further aggravated by the fact that the huge potential of Indian-
and regional-language advertising had been underrated for decades.
Only when market research became more prominent in the 1970s and
1980s was this misperception corrected. When the second National
Readership Survey (NRS) was conducted in 1978, approximately 48
million people were regularly reading a newspaper or magazine. The
biggest growth rates were registered in so-called Class III cities
with populations between 20,000 and 50,000 people. This increase in
readership alone demonstrates that the print media sector had
achieved a considerable success in the history of the Indian market
economy. At the same time, this development also led to
speculations about the potential readership in less urbanized or
rural regions (Jeffrey 2000: 15).10 Only five per cent of the total
number of newspapers distributed throughout India at the beginning
of the 1970s reached the rural regions of the country, indicating
how large the urban-rural divide must have been until then. By the
mid-1980s, the English- and Indian-language press reached 37.2
percent of the urban and 7.1 percent of the rural population. From
the 1990s onwards, however, the urban- rural divide began to
diminish. According to the 1998 Indian Readership Survey (IRS), 58
percent of the grown-up population (persons older than 15 years) in
urban settings and 25 percent of the rural grown-up population were
regular readers of daily newspapers and the diminution of this gap
continued in the 2000s (Jeffrey 2000: 3 and Schneider 2005: 98).
Currently, the readership of online editions of Indian newspapers
is of special interest to marketing companies. Besides the
relatively high number of readers abroad, these online offerings
are frequently used by readers in smaller towns in India. The rise
of market research in India and its surprising findings not only
led to an expansion of regional markets and the inclusion of
completely new segments but also caused an unprecedented boom in
the advertising sector. Between 1981 and 1996, the budget of the
biggest advertising agencies increased from 320 to 4,200 Caror
Rupees, i.e., 13 times, according to Jeffrey (1 caror = 10 million)
(Jeffrey 2000: 60). The English-language press was not the only one
to benefit from this increase; the Indian-language press did too.
From the mid-1980s onwards, approximately half of the total amount
invested into advertising went into the Indian-language sector. The
increases in advertising expenditure in the 1980s and 1990s were so
large that their volume alone would have provided rising revenue to
Indian-language publications able to attract the attention of
advertisers. But “print” was now accepted to mean print in Indian
languages as well as English. During the 1980s, the Indian-language
press captured a larger proportion of print advertising expenditure
than ever before.
10 According to Kumar, a total of 15,814 newspapers and magazines
in more than 75 languages
were published or distributed in India in 1978 (Kumar 1987:
12).
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8
In spite of the expansion of TV: India’s ‘Newspaper Revolution’ in
the 1980s and 1990s During the same period, the entertainment media
emerged as another major competitor for these rising advertising
expenditures. At the beginning of the 1980s, the state-owned TV
channel Doordarshan had already begun to show commercials (see
Mankekar 1999). Another major rival appeared in 1991 in the guise
of satellite and cable television. As a consequence, the share of
advertising expenditure for print media sank from approximately 75
percent in 1985 to approximately 60 percent in 1997 (Jeffrey 2000:
62) Initially, this had no palpable ramifications for the print
media sector, seeing that, “driven by the ‘liberalization’ of the
Indian economy and the arrival of multi-national corporations,
advertising expanded at ‘frenetic pace’”(ibid.). For individual
newspapers or magazines within this sector, however, the rise of
entertainment media intensified competition. The same was true of
the ‘shooting stars’ among the Hindi and regional-language press as
well as the English-language press. Against the background of a
steadily growing new middle class in India, the latter could no
longer claim exclusive access to the audience with the highest
purchasing power (Chandrasekhar 2002). The result was increased
commercialization, if not commodification, of news and news- making
and the use of fairly aggressive marketing strategies in order to
woo more advertisers. Although advertisers, not readers, bring in
the money, large advertising budgets are tied to
consumption-oriented audiences. Hence, many newspapers in India
made ample use of numbers and statistics based on the latest market
research surveys in their marketing campaigns. It is also
interesting to note how strongly the advertising strategies of
successful newspapers such as Mathrubhumi (Malayalam), Hitavada
(English), Sanmarg Hindi Daily and Dainik Jagran (Hindi) resembled
each other: In most cases, ‘convincing’ numbers from the latest
Readership Surveys (either NRS or IRS) were quoted, along with
explicit reference to the purchasing power of the respective
reading audience. I would like to illustrate this specific
advertising tactic by quoting from three campaigns run by newspaper
companies which ran ten years ago, between January and July 2003,
but a very similar pattern can be found in many campaigns
today.
Advertisement from the Mathrubhumi campaign (published in: Outlook
2003, Jan-July): Kalyan silks, what I started as a small showroom
in Thrissur has now transformed itself into a well-known brand in
Kerala. Mathrubhumi, with its staggering readership of 75.48 lakhs
(source NRS 2002; 1 lakh is 100.000 in the Indian calculation
system) has ensured me good reach among all categories of people.
And its credibility as a newspaper has added punch to my
advertising. This is what I call a double impact. Advertisement
from the Hitavada campaign (published in: Outlook 2003, Jan-July):
The Hitavada- English Readers. Educated Readers. Affluent Readers.
303,000 Readers. Can your media plan afford not to reach them? IRS
2002 certifies what you already knew - the highest read English
daily of Central India.
Vol.3No.2Autumn/Winter 2013 www.globalmediajournal.de
9
Advertisement from the Dainik Jagran campaign for the regional
editions in Bihar and Punjab (published in: Outlook 2003,
Jan-July): The rising popularity graph of Dainik Jagran in Bihar
ensures a rising sales graph for your client […]. For the simple
reason that over 70% of its readership are in the SEC AB segment.
Surprised? Good, for there’s even more. Its readers possess the
best purchasing power. […] So go ahead, make your client happy. Now
that you know how. Now there’s a solid media option to reach out to
readers in Punjab. […] What’s more interesting is the fact that
this readership has come from readers who matter. Which means now
you have a winner for clients wanting to advertise in Punjab.
Considering the fact that India’s most successful and widely read
daily newspaper, Dainik Jagran (Hindi), especially in the 1990s
cultivated the image of a down-to- earth, non-elitist newspaper it
is remarkable that the paper would nevertheless make use of the
same advertising tactics by referring to “readers who matter” in
the following decade. The close interplay of market research and
newspapers as well as the strong direction of advertising tactics
towards potential advertisers can partly be explained by the
increased occurrence of so-called price wars. In the wake of ‘price
wars’: Extremely low newspaper prices At the beginning of the
1990s, this aggressive marketing technique was first introduced by
the Times of India but soon found many imitators among the
Indian-language or regional press. The basic idea of a price war is
to undermine the dominant position of a newspaper in a specific
locality by systematically reducing the price for a single copy of
one’s own paper and thereby forcing the rival to do the same.
Subsequently, prices for newspapers fell to such a low level in
India that sales alone could not cover the costs of production and
distribution; as a consequence, wooing of advertisers increased
significantly. In a recently published article, R. Jagadeeswara Rao
describes the unchanged ‘price war’ tactics of Times of India in
the south Indian city of Visakhapatnam. A longer quote from this
article may serve as a very good illustration of the stiff
competition daily newspapers are faced with in Indian cities
today:
"‘Times of India for less than Re. 1 a day’. This, rather alluring
advertisement on huge billboards that one cannot miss in the busy
centers of Visakhapatnam city, signals an imminent ‘price war’ of
sorts in print media. […] Visakhapatnam with a population of about
20 lakh, is the second most important city after Hyderabad in
Andhra Pradesh. It is also called “City of Destiny’, ‘Port City’
(it handles the second largest quantity of cargo, after Kandla
(Gujarat) port in the country) and ‘Happening City’. The leading
English daily in the city is The Hindu. The other important English
dailies are the Deccan Chronicle and the New India Express. The
latest entrant into the city which is yet to make its present felt,
is the one year old, Hyderabad-based English daily ‘Hans India’,
owned by the proprietors of Kapil Chit Funds. […] Now the cover
price of the 20-plus pages The Hindu is Rs.3. The Sunday edition is
priced at Rs.5. The cover price of both Deccan Chronicle (sixteen
page broad sheet and 16 page tabloid) and Hans India is Rs.3. The
New Indian Express is offered at a price of Rs.2.50 a copy. […]
Leading Telugu dailies like Eenadu, Saakshi and Andhra Jyothi, are
all priced at Rs.3 a
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10
copy, and hence the reader had to only select the language of the
daily and there was nothing to lose or gain for subscribing to a
particular daily newspaper. It is against this background that the
TOI, with strong brand image and latest technology, is entering the
market in the city. The result is anybody’s guess." (Rao
2012)
The emergence of a multilingual “consumer sphere” Apart from the
dynamic interplay of advertising, regionalization and localization,
the continuously rising growth rates in newspaper readership since
the end of the 1970s can be explained by several other factors. A
major political factor was the end of the Emergency in 1977. The
darkest period of Indian democracy, as it is often referred to, was
characterized by sharp censorship measures, the manipulation of
media content, and a massive curtailment of the freedom of the
press. When the Emergency ended, an enormous demand for information
about the events during this phase had accumulated in Indian
society, as Jeffrey argues:
[…] inside the bottle into which Mrs Gandhi had jammed a cork in
1975, immense curiosity built up. Once she was defeated in the 1977
elections, tens of millions of people searched eagerly for news of
what had happened around them in the previous nineteen months […].
In three years - between the depths of the “emergency” in 1976 and
1979, the years before Mrs Gandhi returned to power - newspaper
circulations rose 40 per cent for daily newspapers and 34 per cent
for periodicals. […] People wanted to read about themselves
(Jeffrey 2000: 38; see also Rajagopal 2001: 177).
Moreover, by the end of the 1970s, migration contributed to an
increase in information by Indian society. Millions of people
either had relatives or friends in the United States, Europe or in
some other industrialized country. Informal communication channels
carried new images and ideas of a more comfortable, better life to
India (see Bhatia/Ram 2012: 77-98). These images very much
resembled those projected by advertising agencies in
consumption-oriented market economies (see Appadurai 1996: 4).
Consequently, the demand for information that characterized the
immediate post-Emergency period was accompanied by a sharp increase
in the demand for consumer goods. And this in turn prompted the
Indian government to initiate the first careful step towards the
opening and the deregulation of the Indian economy (Jeffrey 2000:
39). Similarly, the Indian government began to show its willingness
to improve press technologies and the media infrastructure. New
printing machines were imported and the development of new photo
composition programs facilitated the use of the various scripts
used in India for printing (ibid.). These technological innovations
allowed the Indian-language press in all parts of the country to
catch up and expand at a tremendous pace. Another very important
factor in this process was the regional differentiation and
localization of newspaper contents and editorial offices. The
regional-language press in particular benefited from market
research, which enabled decision-makers to assess the real
potential for their newspapers in less urbanized and in rural
areas. The oft-cited pioneer of this profound
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11
transformation of the Indian newspaper was the Telugu press,
especially the daily newspaper Eenadu, which was founded in 1974 by
Ramoji Rao, one of India’s most successful and renowned media
entrepreneurs who was listed several times among the India Today
list of “India’s Top 50 powerful people”. Until today, Eenadu is by
far the most widely read newspaper in Andhra Pradesh and one of the
most successful Indian-language newspapers. Jeffrey brilliantly
describes the fundamental paradox in the relationship between
consumption-oriented market economies and print media: Newspapers
are essential for spreading the liberal idea. Without the existence
of media the circulation of diverse opinions, not to mention the
idea of a freedom of thought is simply impossible. At the same
time, the “limousines” carrying liberalism are maintained, polished
and set in motion by explicit economic interests. Jeffrey argues
that even if newspapers expand mainly because companies consider
more and more parts of the population potential “consumers” not
only of news but also of the products advertised in the newspapers,
this development should not be judged as a negative development
(Jeffrey 2000: 88). Prior to the 1990s, there was hardly any
reporting on local news in India, due to the lack of logistics and
personnel plus the high costs of local news reporting compared to
national and international news (ibid.). Local news coverage could
thus only set in once market research surveys had confirmed that it
was possible to earn money in this field. As Ninan describes in her
detailed analysis of the process of localization of Hindi
newspapers, the flipside of this strong focus on local news and
contexts is that it may affect the connection or rather
connectedness to other localities or regional contexts even within
the same federal state, so that it may also influence the
imagination of the polity in unexpected ways, or, as Ninan puts it,
“begin to weaken the ‘deep comradeship’ that used to bind different
corners of the same state” (Ninan 2007: 297). In the following
section, I would like to discuss in more detail why the binary
categorization of the press in India into an “English language” and
an “Indian language press” (or “vernacular press”, as it is often
called) has posed a major problem for the analysis and
interpretation of media developments in India since the 1980s. A
foundational problem in India-related newspaper research: The
binary linguistic categorization of the press Notwithstanding the
increased commercialization and commodification of the press in
India during the last three decades, the English-language press
still benefits from the high reputation which some of its most
eminent representatives had gained in the context of the struggle
for independence. It looks back on a long history of more than 150
years in India and by and large still enjoys such a good repute
that many would consider it as the true ‘national’ press of India.
In part,
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12
this certainly also has to do with the fact that English-language
newspapers are more accessible outside India and thus came to be
perceived as the sole representative of ‘serious’ and
‘high-quality’ newspaper journalism in India, whereas newspapers in
other Indian languages where very often and for a very long time
not archived (for instance in newspaper libraries in Germany) or
monitored in press offices at all. Until the 1990s, and as a
consequence of this one-sided focus on English-language newspapers,
Hindi newspapers, for example, which were growing at a tremendous
pace since the 1980s were hardly ever included in the monitoring
and systematic qualitative analysis of Indian newspapers. Adding to
this was the continual distrust vis-à-vis the so-called
‘vernacular’ press which originated in the colonial situation and
in the efforts of the British authorities to control all the
printed material that was hard to access for them because of the
language, and that could be potentially ‘seditious’. However, the
independent state seemed to be equally leery of the Indian-language
press (see Naregal, 1999: 1-13), and this official mistrust was
reinforced when the ruling Congress Party under Rajiv Gandhi tried
to reestablish a central institution for the monitoring of the
Indian-language press in the mid- 1980s, i.e. ‘India speaks’, which
was “an attempt to digest and report on Indian- language newspapers
around the country which had the aroma of a British institution,
the Vernacular (or Native) Newspaper Reports, begun in the late
1860s to try to keep tabs on what was going on in the bazaar
(Jeffrey 2003: 7)”. As mentioned above, the unequal treatment was
partly based on the central government’s assumption that the
non-English-language press was “less national” and “less modern”
and exhibited more “communalist tendencies” than the English-
language press. And indeed, this general perception seemed to find
a renewed justification with regard to the obvious manifold
connections between the emergent Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) and
the Hindi press in the 1990s (see Farmer 1996, Nandy 1997,
Rajagopal 2001 and Rawat 2003) as well as in the context of the
anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat in 2002, when sections of the
Gujarati press were accused of inciting the violence (see HRW 2002:
34f.). Against this background, the binary categorization of a
“national” (= English-language) vs. a “regional” (=
Indian-language) press was once again reinforced significantly.
Simultaneously, the idea that Indian regional languages carry along
a distinct and inherent system of values that can be clearly
distinguished from the values and inherent attitudes that are
transported by the English language was also reaffirmed by many
observers in the 1990s and early 2000s. Two longer quotes, the
first one from an academic publication (1999) and the second one
from a literary magazine (2003), shall serve to illustrate this
aspect most clearly:
The researchers found that some of the most ethnic-centred stories
came from the regional- language newspapers. These newspapers were
serving the ethnic interests of their readers. […] This became more
pronounced in the ethnic-language or vernacular media. It was also
prominent among media catering to local or regional audiences
rather than those serving national audiences. In countries such as
India, the English-language press was able to
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13
transcend narrow communal and ethnic loyalties because of the
cosmopolitan composition of the readers of the English-language
press, but this press reaches only a miniscule proportion of the
population in these countries (Goonasekera/Youchi 1999: 9). […]
deep within the sumless folds of the language beats the hidden
heart of the nation. The language carries its own values, the
comforting familiarity of its age-old prejudices. Second, the
message is contained within the language constituency, and English
has no regional base. The only ‘national’ language, English opens
up the message to a pan-Indian, maybe even an international
audience. It has its uses, it has its dangers. […] In short, though
there are several exceptions in both categories, by the very nature
of their language and audience, the English language media is
generally smarter and more secular than other media (Dev Sen 2003:
19).
In such an essentialized and static understanding of language and
supposedly homogenous linguistic communities, political attitudes
and sentiments are seen as given a priori, stemming from the signs
and symbols that are associated with a given language, while the
complex situation and context of news(paper) production and
distribution, the subject position of journalists or the diverse
expectations and interpretations by audiences, and other important
factors are more or less faded out. Regarding the first quote,
besides the deeply problematic equation of “regional” and “ethnic”,
the most striking aspect is the assumption that the
English-language and the regional-language press are seen as
representatives of two diametrically opposed and monolithic
interest groups - and accordingly, of two distinct public spheres
and audiences. “National” interests are generally ascribed to
English-language newspapers, and this nationalism seems to be per
se rational, liberal and legitimate, while “regionalism” as a
synonym for “narrow communal and ethnic loyalties” is categorically
attributed to Indian-language newspapers. Against the background of
very violent conflicts in the last two decades, many researchers
and journalists seized on this reemerging idea of an Indian public
sphere that was primarily split along the linguistic dividing lines
(see Rajagopal 2001 and 2009: 207-227). Without dismissing the
important empirical findings and interpretations with regard to the
Gujarati and the Hindi press, and without ignoring the vociferous
attempts to actually (re-)produce this “split public” on every
level, it can be argued that a conceptualization of Indian society
as “split” in two monolithic blocks, an “ethnic” vs. a
“cosmopolitan” block willingly or unwillingly reproduces earlier
hierarchical conceptualizations which were first established by the
colonial administration. It is thus debatable whether this deeply
Eurocentric categorization can provide a suitable analytical
framework for the extremely diverse and fragmented category ‘press
in India’, which today includes publications in more than 100
languages and regional dialects and which is situated in very
different contexts that make it problematic to compare, for
instance, Assamese or Urdu newspapers with the Hindi press -
despite the fact that they are all “Indian-language”. While it may
be correct to use the term “regional press” for the Assamese press,
Urdu, for example, in India has no clearly fixed regional base.
There are Urdu speaking communities all over India, but the
most
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14
successful Urdu newspapers today can be found in the southern
federal state of Andhra Pradesh, especially in the capital
Hyderabad. Even more problematic is the categorization of the Hindi
press as “regional”, because its outreach nowadays extends far
beyond the Hindi-speaking states and Hindi newspapers were able to
win over readers from the English-language as well as from other
segments in the last two decades, especially in southern
metropolises such as Mumbai or Bengaluru/Bangalore. Similarly, the
English-language press also managed to enter into segments that
either had been dominated earlier by Indian-language newspapers or
that did not even exist before. Another trend which became more
noticeable in the 1990s and 2000s further blurs these categorical
boundaries, i.e. that there is a clearly definable group of readers
who regularly read both, English-language as well as
Indian-language newspapers. Also, in regions where newspapers
compete with each other within the same language segment,
English-language and Indian- language newspapers are all
increasingly forced to ‘discover’ new markets that may differ
considerably from their usual average reader profile (see Schneider
2005: 137). But most importantly, Dev Sen’s assessment that the
“English language media is generally smarter and more secular than
other media” is rather problematic. A qualitative analysis of the
coverage of the Shah Bano case and subsequent debate on the
introduction of a Uniform Civil Code vs. the preservation of
religion-based personal law (1985-87), one of the most
controversial and ongoing debates in postcolonial India, for
instance, clearly showed that the bias against the Muslim minority
was also strong in some of the English-language newspapers
(Schneider 2005). If secularism in India is understood to mean that
all religious communities are treated equally and that an equal
distance is maintained to all of them, then certain
English-language newspapers in India have violated this principle
in the past three decades as much as other newspapers in the Indian
or regional languages did (see also Rajagopal 2001 and Rawat 2003).
When the secular nation-state came under fire in the second half of
the 1980s, there was also short period when the prevailing
hierarchy between the English- language and the Indian-language
press came under criticism (see Hasan 1989 and 1999). In this
critical discourse, it was above all the ‘elitist’ position of the
English press as well as their status as a ‘national’ press which
was contested. At that time, the English-language press was accused
of conveying an idea of the state as a monolithic organization,
whereas smaller, regional and local newspapers were found to
portray and describe the multi-layered and de-central texture of
the Indian state (see Gupta/Aggarwal 1996 and Farmer 1996: 109f.).
Basically, however, this could be said to be a mere inversion of
the binary hierarchy. Despite the reinterpretation of both
categories, the inherent problem and analytical fuzziness of a
dichotomous construction of the ‘national vs. regional’ was not
acknowledged nor addressed. A general revaluation of ‘the regional’
in this context, for example, completely ignores the fact that
there may be a number of Indian- language newspapers (apart from
the Hindi press) whose self-perception and
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15
understanding is firmly grounded on the idea that they are part of
the “national press” in India, even if their reach may be defined
or limited by the linguistic region. For example, The Mathrubhumi
from Kerala very confidently uses the self- designation “The
national daily in Malayalam” (Jeffrey 2000: 217). So why should the
idea of belonging simultaneously to a national as well as a
regional community be considered as mutually exclusive? Equally
problematic is the persistent idea that regional means
automatically ‘less urban’ or that Indian-language newspapers are
mostly read in smaller cities and rural areas, whereas English is
the preferred newspaper language of metropolitan audiences. It may
be true that English-language newspapers are facing more
difficulties when they look for new markets in less urbanized
places, than many Indian-language newspapers do at the moment. To
assume that Indian-language newspapers do not have a strong
presence in the bigger cities and metropolises of the country,
however, would be absolutely wrong. But as urban markets have
become more and more saturated in India in the last few years,
both, English- as well as Indian-language publishing houses are
determined, to “go local and deeper into our heartland via print”,
as D.D. Purkayastha, MD and CEO of the Ananda Bazar Patrika Group
recently put it in an interview (Hasan 2013a). The Times of India
Group (Bennett, Coleman and Company Ltd), for instance, is set to
launch a Gujarati edition of The Times of India in the western
Indian state in September 2013, and it is not their only experiment
with regional or Indian-language editions or new newspapers:
The last few years has seen Bennett, Coleman and Company Ltd (BCCL)
eyeing the regional market extensively. The group launched Bengali
paper Ei Samay last year in West Bengal, besides more editions of
Maharashtra Times in cities such as Nashik, Aurangabad and Nagpur.
TOI’s Gujarati edition will face stiff competition from market
leader Gujarat Samachar and Divya Bhaskar, along with Sandesh,
Gujarat Mitra and Darpan. It is learnt that the existing newspapers
in the Gujarat market are gearing up for the new entrant with a
slew of promotions to attract the Gujarati readers (Hasan
2013c).
Similarly, the English-language newspaper The Hindu is going to
launch a Tamil edition in September 2013 (Balasubramanian 2013).
These examples illustrate that especially under the conditions of a
highly competitive media market with strong tendencies towards an
increasing horizontal and vertical, cross-media integration, it
should no longer be assumed that the publication language a priori
defines the orientation of a newspaper. Nor can it be assumed that
reading groups represent homogenous “ethnic communities”, as
Goonasekera and Youchi argue. As Rawat suggests, precisely because
newspapers want to survive and grow, it is not completely
inconceivable that even a Hindi newspaper which was formerly a
staunch supporter and even a mouthpiece of rising Hindu
nationalism, could adopt a less ‘culturalist’ tenor and readjust
its profile (Rawat 2003: 1-21). By expanding beyond the language
region of the so-
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called Hindi belt, Hindi newspapers may be said to have more in
common with the English-language press than with many other
Indian-language newspapers, so in which category would they fit
nowadays, national or regional press? Or should we understand the
phenomenon of the rise of Hindi newspapers as a “vernacular11
modernity”, as Neyazi suggests and by which he means “the critical
appropriation of Western modernity reproduced in indigenous
form”?12 In sum, one could argue that the continued binary
categorization of the Indian newspaper landscape into an
English-language and a regional press, at least in part, obstructs
the in-depth analysis and overdue differentiation of analytical
categories that is required in order to gain a more nuanced
understanding of the growth dynamics of newspaper development in
India - despite the rapid expansion of TV, the internet and above
all at present, the mobile phone industry (see Doron/Jeffrey 2013).
The commercial knowledge production, which primarily addresses the
information needs of the media industry, seems to take these
constant changes and continued blurring of existing or imagined
boundaries into account, but the problem of categorization also
needs to be reconsidered by academic publications about the print
media in India. All the more when there is a clear tendency that
‘regional press’ can be, in many cases, but does not necessarily
have to be defined by the publication language, but rather by the
localized content and scope of a newspaper. The current situation,
in which regional is understood by many as the “new national in
terms of consumer spend propensity and hence, attention of
marketers” (Hasan 2013b), seems to be markedly different form the
times in which it made perfect sense to apply the notion of a
linguistically split public to the Indian newspaper landscape and
perhaps also to its audience. This is certainly not meant to deny
the many old and new chasms and inequalities that do exist in
India, but rather to draw the attention to the fuzziness of these
categories and to the interrelation of processes of media and
social change in India which should be reflected in the analytical
categories too. As can be seen in the three tables below, the
Indian Readership Survey now uses the three categories of “Hindi
Dailies”, “English Dailies” and the newly introduced category
“Language Dailies”. However, for someone who may not be familiar
with the historical and contemporary background of this
categorization of the newspaper landscape in India, “language
daily” might perhaps be a rather confusing term.
11 Neyazi’s use of the term can be understood as a conscious
re-appropriation and new
interpretation of the concept. 12 “By adopting technological
innovation and being sensitive to local cultural values,
Hindi
newspapers have been able to provide hybrid content to their
readers. Such a hybrid content is sensitive to the vernacular realm
of Hindi publics while incorporating a modern outlook and values”
(Neyazi 2010: 908).
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17
Tab. 3: TOP 10 Hindi Dailies (Average issue numbers, all figures in
‘000)13 Publication IRS 2012 Q 3 IRS 2012 Q 4 Dainik Jagran 16474
16370 Dainik Bhaskar 14491 14416 Hindustan 12242 12246 Amar Ujala
8536 8434 Rajasthan Patrika 6818 6837 Punjab Kesari 3364 3323
Prabhat Khabar 2761 2859 Navbharat Times 2639 2633 Patrika 2051
2068 Nai Dunia 1553 1358 Tab. 4: TOP 10 English Dailies (Average
issue numbers, all figures in ‘000) Publication IRS 2012 Q 3 IRS
2012 Q 4 The Times of India 7653 7615 Hindustan Times 3786 3820 The
Hindu 2258 2164 The Telegraph 1254 1265 Deccan Chronicle 1051 1020
DNA 962 972 Mumbai Mirror 807 819 The Economic Times 753 735 The
Tribune 653 671 The New Indian Express 664 652 Tab. 5: TOP 10
Language Dailies (Average issue numbers, all figures in ‘000)
Publication IRS 2012 Q 3 IRS 2012 Q 4 Malayala Manorama (Malayalam)
9752 9760 Daily Thanthi (Tamil) 7417 7334 Lokmat (Marathi) 7409
7313 Mathrubhumi (Malayalam) 6415 6334 Eenadu (Telugu) 5957 5972
Ananda Bazar Patrika (Bengali) 5788 5750 Sakshi (Telugu) 5343 5379
Gujarat Samachar (Gujarati) 5153 5114 Dinakaran (Tamil) 4912 4816
Daily Sakal (Marathi) 4403 4469
The discourse of cultural imperialism and India’s new role as an
expanding media power in the 1990s and 2000s The rapid expansion of
transnationally active media corporations in the 1990s led to the
recurrence of the debate on cultural imperialism, in India as well
as in other nation states in South and Southeast Asia. However,
while the forced rhetorical dissociation from the ‘West’ influenced
the renewed imagination and actual
13 All IRS 2012 data are retrieved from the Media Research Users
Council (MRUC):
http://www.mruc.net/ (last checked Sep 11, 2013).
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18
integration of an ‘Asian culture and community’, Indian media
companies were actually quick to adapt to the new rules of media
globalization and began to expand far beyond India’s borders. In
the mid-1990s, when the controversy over the question whether
foreign direct investments (FDI) into the Indian print media sector
should be allowed or not had reached a first peak, statements like
the following one were not uncommon:
The print media seeking to ride into India with hi-tech might and
propagandist power to consolidate the West’s cultural conquest will
make Indians un-Indian and our politicians welcoming economic
recolonisation (Iyer 1994: 3082).
V.R. Krishna Iyer, a former Supreme Court judge, worked hard to
mobilize public opinion against the intended opening of the Indian
print market. He was convinced that every Indian was bound to
support the “Operation Rescue of Indian print media”. Among the
opponents of FDI into the Indian press sector were some of the most
powerful press companies in the country, especially the Times of
India Group, the Hindu Group and the Eenadu Group. Although the
potential weakening of their market position was most probably the
real reason for this attitude, many editorials and lead articles
which were published in their newspapers depicted the question of
FDI as a major threat to India’s culture. Besides ‘cultural
imperialism’, terms such as ‘India’s threatened sovereignty’ or a
‘new form of colonialism’ were frequently used in this debate (see
also Sonwalkar 2001a). Similar statements were made on the
political level. The oppositional alliance comprised, among others,
the Congress Party, the Indian Newspaper Society, the Indian Press
Council and all- Indian trade union federations. Congress Party
spokesman Anand Sharma announced that his party maintained its
position as it had been declared in the 1950s. As early as 1954,
the first Press Commission of India had emphatically warned against
allowing foreign players to enter the Indian press sector. The
recommendation led to the legal prohibition of foreign direct
investments in 1955. In February 2002, 47 years later, it seemed
that the opponents of FDI would be successful again: The pro-FDI
draft bill pushed by the BJP-led government was initially voted
down in a parliamentary committee in February that year, but
nevertheless enforced in the same year. Subsequently, the
government allowed 26 per cent foreign direct investment in the
news and current affairs segment in the Indian media, and 74 per
cent in the non-news, non-current affairs segment which includes
technical, medical and other specialized journal, whereas business
publications fall in the news and current affairs sector: “The
rider is that Indian shareholding should be significantly higher
than the 26 per cent FDI. Apart from that, editorial control will
remain in the hands of the Indian company and three- fourths of the
editorial posts will have to be occupied by Indians” (n.a. 2002).
Reasons for the opposition to Foreign Direct Investment into the
press sector At first sight, the stance of the Congress Party may
have been a surprise for many observers, for the Congress of the
1990s and the early 2000s surely was no longer
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a strict supporter of the idea of economic self-reliance and
autonomy vis-à-vis the former colonial powers. Ever since the
reforms at the beginning of the 1990s, the Congress Party had
rather come to symbolize the economic liberalization of the
country. It had also been the driving force behind the opening up
of Indian television as an advertising market for sponsors and
advertisers from abroad. In view of this, what could explain the
fierce opposition against the opening of the Indian press to FDI?
The answer lies partly in the historical meaning of the press and
in its anchoring in collective memory as the ‘national’ medium per
se - not only in terms of its geographical scope, but also with
regard to the emergence of an Indian public sphere which was based
on anti-colonialism (Schneider 2005: 66- 70). In its initial phase,
the Indian press was a product of the reform movements of the
nineteenth century and the struggle for national self-determination
in the first half of the twentieth century. What many of the
leading figures of those movements had in common was the fact that
they were also the pioneers of Indian journalism. Well-known names
such as Ram Mohan Roy, Jawaharlal Nehru and especially Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi were inextricably linked with the political
history of the country and with the history of journalism in India.
It is against this historical background that the ideal of
non-corruptible journalism with a strong political focus is still
the measuring stick which is applied to the postcolonial and
increasingly market-oriented journalism of today. But apart from
the nostalgic idealization of a ‘golden age’ of the Indian press,
one also needs to take into account the alleged ‘invasion from the
sky’, as the introduction of satellite television in the 1990s was
often referred to. In this ‘invasion’ scenario, which could be
observed in a number of postcolonial states in Asia during this
decade, Western print media or satellite channels came to symbolize
the deeply felt threat to the integrity of cultural and
geographical regions as well as of nationally defined borders. What
formed the basis of this scenario was thus the persistent idea of
an unchallenged and dominant ‘centre of power’ in the West, which
was supposedly trying to maintain its colonial domination over the
‘periphery’ according to the logic of a borderless corporate
capitalism. This “discourse of complaint and protest”, as Ang calls
it, was inspired by the widely received theory of Herbert Schiller,
who equates cultural imperialism with media imperialism (Ang 2002:
565). As Ang (2002) and Tomlinson (2002) rightly criticize, it is
rather reductionist to consider media as powerful agents who
permeate all social and cultural textures and, more importantly, as
the sole cause of abrupt socio-cultural changes. Tomlinson and
other cultural and media theorists have repeatedly argued against
the idea of a homogenized global culture as a result of media
globalization. They also question the idea of an unchallenged
‘centre of power’ in the West vis-à-vis its countless
‘peripheries’. Interestingly, however, some of the states in South
and Southeast Asia argued for the promotion of a new “Asian
perspective” as the foundation for their own global ambitions.
According to Ang, it was this discursive shift which marked the
transition of the
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20
anti-colonial or post-colonial climate to what could be termed a
“neocivilizational climate” (Ang 2002: 580; see also Morley 2006:
30-43). In lieu of a specific national identity, the renewed
Asianism stressed the importance of Asia as a transnational
cultural community, one which was to present itself as united on
the cultural terrain in order to promote transregional economic
integration. Of course those efforts have not rendered the nation
state irrelevant. On the contrary: In India, following a phase of
deregulation during which the state had seemingly retreated from
the media sector, attempts to re- regulate it became visible in the
beginning of the 2000s, with the effect of limiting the scope of
action for foreign as well as for Indian media companies. When the
new FDI policy for the Indian press sector was enforced in June
2002, the former opponents quickly began to look around for
partners in Great Britain, Australia or in the United States.
Again, it was the big newspaper groups in India which benefited
from it. They are also the biggest players in other media sectors
in India, while a number of smaller publishing houses have
literally been driven out of the market over the last decades. The
expansion of Indian media corporations in the region of South Asia
and beyond (especially in the so-called diaspora markets) is thus
another good example which serves to illustrate the fact that the
dynamics of media capitalism or media globalization are no longer
exclusively generated in the ‘West’ and directed towards an
(equally imaginary) ‘rest’. They have become very real in all kinds
of directions. Thus, as Sonwalkar very pointedly argues, the fear
of a “Murdochization” of the Indian media sector was and is not a
danger that comes from the outside, for India has already generated
its own “media barons” in the 1990s and 2000s:
Instances of cultural/media imperialism within the South figure
less in western media studies, but there seems to be enough
evidence now to suggest that they increasingly complicate regional
politics. The notion of mediascapes as cultural ‘battlegrounds’ is
often evoked in economic terms, but this can well extend to
politics as well, as the situation in South Asia suggests. For
example, elites of Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka not
infrequently speak of Indian cultural imperialism. […] The source
of domination is clearly not necessarily in the North or West; it
can emanate from and within the South as well. In some locales, the
threat posed by the local and the regional may be perceived to be
more serious (Sonwalkar 2001b: 506).
Interestingly, while the Indian government has increased FDI in
areas like telecom and insurance in July 2013, “a key decision on
raising foreign investment in the sensitive media sector remains
pending as the Information & Broadcasting Ministry has sought
advice from TRAI [Telecom Regulatory Authority India] and Press
Council on the matter”. Suggestions to increase FDI in print media
from 26 to 49 per cent within the news and current and to 100 per
cent in the specialized magazines segment and facsimile editions of
foreign newspapers are currently discussed in India and would once
again introduce a new dynamics into the Indian newspaper market
(n.a. 2013).
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Conclusion: Time to de-westernize the debate about the ‘newspaper
crisis’ In a German study entitled “Das Verschwinden der Zeitung?
Internationale Trends und medienpolitische Problemfelder“ (in
English: The vanishing newspaper? International trends and problems
in media policy issues) which was published in 2009, the adjective
“international” referred exclusively to the Northern American
context plus a few western European countries, whereas not more
than two sentences in the sixty-three pages long study were
dedicated to the non-European and non-western regions of the
so-called global South where print media have grown significantly
during the last two decades. A deep Eurocentrism which still seems
to characterize the perception and consequential debate about the
crisis can thus be traced, first of all, in the prevailing notion
that there is an “international” crisis of print media when in
fact, the total global circulation numbers of printed newspapers
have constantly grown until very recently. However, the authors of
this study make a remarkable distinction between “classic
newspapers countries”, such as Germany, Great Britain, France and
the United States and what they perceive - quite unjustly, if you
look at the long history of newspaper journalism in India and in
other Asian countries, for instance - as “newcomers”, i.e. Eastern
Europe, Asia and Africa (see Weichert/Kramp, 2009: 14f.). Equally
significant in this context is the abridged explanation that the
two authors offer for this extraordinary growth of printed
newspapers in non-European regions in the last two or three
decades:
Das Nebeneinander von Pressesterben und sprunghaften
Auflagenzuwächsen beruht dabei auf einem typischen Merkmal des
‚digital divide’, der digitalen Spaltung: Verlage in
Entwicklungsländern [sic] profitieren von der späten
Alphabetisierung und dem technischen Rückstand, während das
Internet im Rest der Welt immer populärer wird und die Verweildauer
zunimmt - auch in Deutschland (Weichert/Kramp, 2009:15).14
What the authors seem to suggest here, like many observers do, is
that the absence of state-of-the art technology and the ability of
an increasing number of people to read and write can be considered
as the two decisive factors for the growth of print media. However,
in India, as has already been mentioned, almost every medium and
related technology has been growing very rapidly for some time now
and the internet and mobile phone technology are by far the fastest
growing communication technologies at the moment, while it is
television and satellite which have the widest reach in both, urban
and rural areas. It would thus be wrong to assume that we are
currently witnessing a belated Gutenberg age in India and that the
publishing houses would only flourish until the digital age would
eventually, and once again, belatedly, arrive in India and
subsequently replace or at least marginalize newspapers.
Furthermore, it should not be ignored that in 14 English
translation: This coexistence of a dying press and increases in
circulation figures is
caused by a typical characteristic of the ‘digital divide”:
Publishing houses in developing countries [sic] benefit from the
belated alphabetization and from the technological gap, while the
internet is becoming more and more popular in the rest of the world
and the dwell time is increasing - in Germany too.
Vol.3No.2Autumn/Winter 2013 www.globalmediajournal.de
22
India too, there’s a visible tendency that more and more newspaper
readers are already reading their content on the digital medium, be
it the mobile phone, tablet or laptop, and this also includes some
of the biggest Indian-language newspapers who have an “enviable
readership base on the digital medium” (Hasan 2013b). Not least in
view of the actual newspaper crisis in the US and in Europe, Indian
publishers are closely observing the global development and trying
to envision several best and worst case scenarios with regard to
the future of printed or e- newspapers in India.15 In view of
India’s demographic situation, the question how young readers can
be attracted to newspapers is one of the key concerns at the
moment, so this would be just one among a large number of shared
concerns where a more inclusive and truly global comparison of
newspaper developments could bring fresh perspectives. Especially
relevant with regard to the recent newspaper development in
Arab-speaking countries and in Southeast and East Asia too is also
the question of female newspaper readers who are now increasingly
focused on by advertisers and publishing houses alike (see WAN-IFRA
2013: 14). The second argument of a belated alphabetization also
requires a closer look. The increasing numbers of women and men who
can read and write in India has by now become a standard
explanation for India’s newspaper boom. It is definitely one of the
most important reasons, but, as I hope to have shown with the short
overview of the development during the last decades, it is
nevertheless one among many, but not the only decisive factor for
the remarkable growth of newspapers in India. Far beyond the
contemporary developments and global trends, however, it can be
argued that the continued engagement and attitude of a society or
community towards “its” national, regional or local press also
needs to be contextualized and regarded as a result of the specific
development and political role of the medium in historical
processes and struggles. Having said this, I would nevertheless
argue that today, in the context of a dramatically changing
newspaper market in India in the last couple of years, ‘regional
press’ can no longer be defined by the publication language alone,
but rather by the localized content and scope of a daily newspaper.
The current situation, in which regional is understood by many
market observers as the ‘new national’ in terms of readership and
investments by marketers, thus differs significantly from earlier
times when it made sense to apply the notion of a linguistically
split public to the Indian newspaper landscape and perhaps also to
its audience. At least some of the commentators in the recent
remake of the newspaper debate in Germany linked the crisis of
newspapers with the current “intellectual crisis” in Europe (Weimer
2013), and with the general crisis of the middle classes (Seibt
2013) who feel threatened by rising social inequalities and
increasingly dissociated
15 See for example the programmatic title and description of the
INMA South Asia Conference in
Delhi 2013: “Print: Thriving in the Age of Digital” (22-23 Aug
2013): http://www.inma.org/modules/event/2013SouthAsia/ (last
checked Sep 11, 2013).
Vol.3No.2Autumn/Winter 2013 www.globalmediajournal.de
23
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technology or the media format, but first and foremost the content
and position or positionality of a newspaper which makes it either
relevant or irrelevant for the readers. A lot of credibility and
esteem for the Indian press derives from its important role in the
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